Graph drawing for the web

I’ve been wanting to use cornucopia for a while now, glad to have the chance. Just put up a new update of Graphsy that implements a bunch of features and bug fixes. Most importantly, and most noticeably, the zoom features. Users can now increase or decrease the scale of their drawings. Currently the implemented zoom levels are: 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, 200%, 400%, and 800%. In the future I plan to add arbitrary zoom, but this is a good start.

Also added keyboard shortcuts to context menus. I’ve been talking about them for a few weeks now, and the buttons themselves were annotated with the corresponding key from the very beginning. Now, when a context menu is visible, hitting the key will correspond to pressing that button. The keys correspond to button placement, not what action they represent. For example, ‘q’ will press the upper left key, no matter which context menu comes up. This way the interface can be used with one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard. Hopefully, with this setup, users will not need to look down on the keyboard to hunt for keys and thus can create graphs faster.

The third feature added in this update is a better notification of when a project is not saved. First, a duplicate of the save button has moved to the upper right menu. That button will change color when the current document is out of sync with the saved version. In addition, when users try to leave the studio, Graphsy will inform them if their file is not saved and give them an opportunity to go back and save it.

This update also fixes several bugs. Most had to do with layout, saving, and exporting images.

The next two weeks may be busy, so I don’t know how much Graphsy work I will be able to do. Will try to write another “blog” post though, not sure about the topic yet. Check out the new features and let me know what you think.